You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.